The White Woman of the ELIZA WHITE: Schooner Days CXCIV (194)

___

LONG before I began to work for the club,” said Capt. Jack Marks, as he rang the R.C.Y.C. launch Kwasind down to three-bell speed, so she wouldn’t get there too soon, “I made a queer trip in an old packet you may have known, though even at that time she was on her last legs.

“She was the Eliza White, of Port Hope----."

“A fore-and-after that came to grief thirty years ago on the St. Clair flats or at Owen Sound? She waterlogged with a cargo of cedar posts, when she stranded in the river, and the posts floated out through the bows of her, taking with them new planks that had been put in the winter before at the foot of West Market street here?”

“That’s the one, though I never heard the story of her finish. Well, anyway, she was about due for the boneyard, and I got hold of her while she was lying around the old ‘Hospital slip’ at the foot of Jarvis street, and by good luck I got a chance to take a cargo of fertilizer up to Aldershot, on the north side of Burlington Bay, for the market gardens outside of Hamilton. There wasn’t a big freight on it, but times were hard and I had to make a living.

“The Eliza White, as you’ll remember, was a good chunk of a vessel for the time when she was built. She was 103 feet long and could carry some 300 tons of coal. They used to sail such vessels with a captain, mate, cook, and at least two men forward.

“I couldn’t afford to lay out much in wages, and I could take my time about the trip, so I persuaded a relative—I don’t want to tell you which one—to go with me, and one summer afternoon, with the help of the dock wallopers, we hoisted her two big sails and the three jibs—she was without gafftopsail by this time - and floated off for Hamilton.

“It was beautiful settled weather, and we toddled along, with nothing to do but steer, trick and trick about, until, in the course of twenty-four hours, we nosed up to the bank at Aldershot.

"It was evening when we made fast. I went up to the village to tell the market garden owner his cargo had arrived, and we were ready to unload. On the way back to the vessel I met my entire crew-of one man running up the road with his bag on his back.

“ ‘What’s the matter?’ I sang out as I saw him.

“ ‘I’m quitting’, he panted. ‘I wouldn’t spend the night aboard that vessel if you gave me her and this trip’s freight to boot’.

“ ‘What’s wrong?’

“ ‘Why, as I was sitting smoking in the cabin, after you left, all at once a woman in white walked through the room. She looked right at me, and the look in her big black eyes froze me fast to the chair. I’ve never seen such horror and terror and fear and pain. And all the time she kept wringing her hands with the most awful motion, as if her fingers had turned to live snakes!'

“I tried to argue with him, but I might as well have argued with a man in the D.T’s. Whatever the thing was, that wasn't his trouble, for he was not a drinking man, and the strongest stuff we had on board was lake water.

“Wild horses wouldn’t drag him back to the vessel, so I let him go. I went on board. By this time it was quite dusk. I felt a bit queer when I opened the cabin slide. The lamp he had left lighted was burning steadily, with a little triangle of soot forming on one side of the chimney where it was turned up too high. Everything was perfectly quiet. I could hear the water lapping gently outside. A moth brushed my face, flying in towards the light. I could have screamed.

‘But that was all that happened. I had a smoke and turned in. Next morning the garden man came down with a gang with wheelbarrows and began unloading. I picked up a I couple of hands in Hamilton, and brought the Eliza White back to Toronto. I hadn’t much to do with her after that, for she found a purchaser, and started for the Upper Lakes. They say that after the bows went out of her she had to be towed into Owen Sound stern first, leaving a wake of cedar posts under her-jibboom.

"I never heard of any reappearance of the Woman of Aldershot, and I never heard it accounted for. People have told me that a murder must have been committed on board the Eliza White years before—she was at least forty years old when this happened—but I have never found anyone who had ever heard of this.”

Can anyone explain Capt. Marks’ mystery?

There were two Eliza Whites, pretty little country girls, last century, and two schooners were named after them. One was the Eliza White, of Port Nelson, launched in 1845. She paid tolls according to the books of the old Port Whitby Harbor Co., in 1849, and established a record for late navigation by coming into Toronto on Dec. 15th, 1852. The other was built at Port Burwell on Lake Erie, in 1867, and was later sold to Port Hope owners. Both vessels were built so long ago that if there was an early tragedy associated with either, the passage of seventy, eighty or ninety years seems to have obliterated it from the memory of man.

The ELIZA WHITE'S last appearance in Toronto Bay, a waterfront sketch made from the foot of West Market street in June, 1904.